Since your web page mentions it, sort of like a 'Toyama no kin-
san' plot.
!!!
There's someone else who's actually SEEN "Toyama no Kinsan"?!
Where are you getting it, pray tell? Please tell me it's not
off of KIKU-TV...
It's not. My brother taped a bunch of episodes when he lived
in Japan between '84 and '87, and I got copies (not subtitled).
Around 12-13 episodes, if I remember correctly. This is "Toyama
no Kinsan II", actually, but I think the modus operandi holds.
Or something. It sounds funny, given the length of your story,
but I actually did feel that the resolution was too quick, too
easy.
At that point in writing the story I was feeling... what's
the opposite of "rushed" and "cramped"? The story could easily
have been twice the size it ended up, four times the size I
thought it was going to be when I started it, just by allowing
the sort of complications and setbacks that Burroughs uses all
the time.
Yup. :) But remember what Tolkien said about the one universal
criticism of LOTR (which he agreed with): it's too short.
(That AWFUL cliffhanger at the end of "Gods of Mars"! I'm
surprised his fans didn't lynch him. :)
Can't remember... is that where Dejah Thoris is kidnapped by
the guys who turn out, in "Warlord", to live at the north pole?
And "Gods" ends with John Carter just watching the craft carrying
his wife disappear in the distance?
So I went for the quick and easy resolution, guiltily aware that
it WAS a shortcut, because I wanted to get to the Ranma/Kiima
part... because RHP is really mostly a Ranma/Kiima story, with
the "adventure" partly (perhaps even mostly) a way to throw
them together.
Well, that's true, and it _does_ show up in the story. And those
parts are very well done.
It's just that I feel you're short-changing yourself on the
adventure. You didn't need to write as much, or as good, an
adventure as you have, but you did. You've actually written over
half of a rollicking good adventure, in fact, one which I could
wish I'd written. But I know that, if I had, I would feel pressure
to write the rest, and such pressure is _not_ always welcome.
Oh well. Better than writer's block.
In your case, I would urge you to continue writing, from this
point, with the earliest-set of the stories in your list,
presumably how Ranma came to marry Kasumi (and how the marriage
developed into the formal, traditional Japanese one we see in
AMAW).
That is my intention at this time. Kodachi wants me to write her part
next, though... :/
Oh, well, (ahem)... one little exception surely couldn't hurt... :)
Poor Kodachi doesn't get enough good stories about her anyway...
At this point, I guess it is inevitable that AMAW itself will
eventually become a pointless-seeming epilogue (and I hate
seeing this happen to stories that seem to be breaking new
ground when originally published), but the best way to make
sure that this doesn't happen to any other stories is to
write them in chronological order.
Understood and appreciated. Sometimes that's just the way
things happen, though. I could have held back AMAW once I
became aware that it was part of a much larger story, I
suppose, but then I wouldn't have gotten the
feedback that persuaded me that other people actually wanted
to READ it.
True enough. Yes, I agree that sometimes this just happens,
and the result just has to be lived with. Part of the process
of building the larger story.
We'll see what happens. If necessary, I can try to rethink
AMAW to make it what it needs to be.
Good luck on this; I think it'll be quite hard. Although,
if you don't write the Akane story, and then tell it in flashback
in a revised AMAW, slanting the whole story more towards the
bittersweetness and regret, it might still work.
Sometimes it seems to me that fanfic is as much process as
product. :)
I certainly agree with that! I use the web-publishing model
myself, as I feel free to revise my own stories whenever I
want, and repost them to my own web site. So I certainly
think of my stories as ongoing process to some extent.